


Love after War

by Galaxy_of_Ashes2906 (orphan_account)



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Bisexual T'Challa (Marvel), Everyone Is Gay, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Panic Attacks, Romance, Self-Discovery, Self-Hatred, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21765019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Galaxy_of_Ashes2906
Summary: After the Erik Killmonger crisis, W'Kabi and T'Challa are engaged and all has been forgiven. But has the Head of Border Patrol forgiven himself for his crimes or will he feel that he is a burden to the King? And is T'Challa as calm and emotionally well as he seems to his family?
Relationships: T'Challa/W'Kabi (Marvel)
Kudos: 1





	1. W'Kabi

**Author's Note:**

> I had no clue what to call this, so enjoy this very generic title that sounds a little like a Hallmark Movie title. 
> 
> This is not a Hallmark Movie...
> 
> This will touch base on a lot of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, etc, some W'Kabi, some T'Challa's. So if whump is not your cup of tea, turn back now. 
> 
> Note: there will be warning on the beginnings of chapters that weigh heavy with these things.

"Would you kill me, my love?" I stare into the eyes of my wife, her dark eyes glaring into mine. I feel panic creeping into my gut, contracting my lungs and making it difficult to breathe. Would I die at the hands of my wife? Or would she find mercy for me? 

"For Wakanda? Without question." Okoye was a fierce, brave warrior who had more dedication to her country than she did even to our marriage. She would follow her loyalty more than her heart. 

I used to admire her for that, but things had changed. 

And now I had no choice. I drop the blade into the drying ground, it's absence leaving a cold feeling in my palm. I kneel at the point of her razor-sharp spear, and my men followed after my lead, yielding under the rest of the Doras and Nakia and even the Princess. 

What followed was a blur. I and the rest of the Border Patrol were escorted to our underground cells until the Council and King would decide if we were guilty or not. The cell was cold and wet, and a group of highly-respected warriors was now being treated like filthy criminals.

All the while, the guilt laid heavy on my heart, making me wish that I could only make up for my crimes. And the day I and my men were decided to be not guilty, I swore to myself I would make it up. 

* * *

_"Mama?" flaming piece of debris floated down to the burnt grass as he ran out of the safe house, towards the two corpses. "Baba?"_

_Tears from the smoke and my sorrows choked me and tried to shake them awake, begging their lifeless bodies to hold me, to tell me everything was going to be okay. I sobbed when they didn't wake up. They were dead. Gone._

_I felt a hand on my shoulder, my grandmother ushering me into the safe house._

_Then followed was the cold, cruel laughter of my parents' murderer._

"Another nightmare?" a groggy voice rose from the darkness when I woke up abruptly, shouting out as Klaue's laughter still rang in my ears. T'Challa, my fiance rolled around, his long, calloused fingers brushing over the raised scars on my cheeks. I nodded, whisking away the sweat from my forehead with the bedsheets. 

"Twenty years of therapy and I am still having them." I murmur, shaking my head. They had gotten worse in the past two years since Klaue was killed. I thought his death would bring peace, but instead, it brought back memories, fresh and just as gruesome as it was the day it happened. It had been so much for an eight-year-old to face. It controlled so much of my life. 

But now I have T'Challa to help me through it and I was grateful.

After I was announced to be innocent, we grew closer than ever before. Then one fateful night after I drank too much, I kissed him, and he kissed me back.

He was not drunk. 

Things escalated, and now here I am, in his impossibly comfortable bed, cuddled in close beside him in the world's softest sheets. My head resting on his chest while he gently stroked one cheek, his other hand soothingly rubbing my back. 

The past year has been tough, and at times one of us has woken the other up from a nightmare with a nightmare. But we had both learned how to stick through it and now we were stronger than ever, both in our relationship and our minds. 

Still, there are days where the only thing I can do is comfort him when he suffers from his anxiety attacks from the incident in Vienna or the fight with his cousin, and in turn, he comforts me when my childhood trauma haunts me. 

At times I feel guilty that I cannot get over it after all these years, guilty as well for how I stabbed my oldest and closest friend in the back, and even then he found it to forgive me and love a broken fool like myself. 

Maybe I did not only do what I did because I felt the need to thank N'Jadaka for but because I was scared of the feelings I had for T'Challa. But even after I saw my best friend get thrown off a cliff, I still could not shake my feelings. My attractions. 

I was never good at expressing my emotions. I knew there was nothing wrong with being queer, but when everyone else around me growing up was straight, I felt...strange. And when T'Challa came out to me years ago as bisexual, I could not quite form the words I needed to express my own sexuality. I still do not have them. 

For the longest time, I have been labeled as many things; son, orphan, student, Head of Border Patrol, husband, now fiance. So maybe I don't need another label. I just love who my heart decides I'll love.

And when the person I love asked me if I was feeling better, I nodded, thanking him and kissing him on the stubbly cheek. 

"Good," he whispered, pulling me even closer to him. "I love you, W'Kabi." 

I was loved even after my crimes. 

I was safe. 

But some things were harder to forgive myself for. 


	2. T'Challa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i lost this fic in a sea of untitled documents on google but i found it again so i plan on writing more of it

Zuri said it best; some truths are too much to bear.

And the truth that my father is gone still saddens me deeply. As King, I do not have the time or energy to grieve, and although I feel that a son's job of grieving his father is never complete, I must numb my feelings daily to keep rooted in my work.

After all, I have a country to run and protect, a sister and mother to look after, and a wedding to plan.

And yet the glossy, dead eyes, bloody temple, and cold skin of my father after the attack at Vienna still haunt my mind greatly.

"Fire lilies would be a representation of our love," W'Kabi suggested, pulling me from my head while we discussed arrangements with our wedding planners.

One planner, I believe he said his name was Abioye, hummed, nodding as he marked something down on a bedazzled clipboard. "Burning passion would be an excellent theme to show."

"Is that not already presented in the Candle lighting ceremony?" I questioned, brows furrowed. Wakanda had many different traditions when it came to weddings. One of which was the Candle Lighting. Each member of the couple simultaneously lit one big candle with two little candles, blowing their candle out to represent how their lives become one at the moment of their marriage.

My parents performed the ceremony during the wedding, which is one of the reasons why it is so important to me.

Kali, the other planner, shrugged. "In my opinion, one cannot have too much burn passion as long as they don't cause a house fire."

I lazily flip through the digital pamphlet given to us by the florists who usually handle the royal galas and weddings. "We could import white lilies. They represent purity in a marriage."

"So does the white rope we tie," W'Kabi reminded. "Does everything need to have a meaning? Can we not just pick a flower just for the sake of us finding it beautiful, we already have many symbols for this ceremony."

Abioye looked thoughtful. "King Azzuri and Queen Nanili had green and gold-coated leaves with small, white baby's breath as their flowers to represent their two tribes merge. Perhaps we can do blue and gold for this wedding."  
I nodded, growing tired of the meeting. Preferably, I did not want a huge to-do for the ceremony, and neither did W'Kabi, But the marriage of any King is huge, especially when it is the first time in our history that it is a royal queer couple betrothed.

It is not that Wakanda is unsupportive of LGBT marriage, unlike the colonized nations all around us. But it did pose an issue on the matter of an heir. But there were ways to get around it.

Since neither one of us held the right parts to carry an infant. But we promised the Council we would make it work; perhaps with a surrogate. There’s nothing in the law saying that the heir has to be related to both kings, only the ruler.

“Well if the flowers are settled, we should move onto the cake. Here’s the cake that your parents served at their wedding,” Kali projected a photo from a sleek tablet; one that I saw while looking through their wedding album once as a child.

I stared at the photo, swallowing thickly while she talked about the round, basin-like cake topped with edible leaves and flowers. The decorations represented a flourishing marriage, and in the case of a royal wedding, they represent what the couple would give the country as King and Queen. Or at least hoped to give. I remember once when I asked my parents about their wedding, my father said the cake was too bland for his taste. If my memory serves me correctly, my mother had playfully swatted him and informed me that it was more about the meaning of the cake instead of the flavor.

As a twelve-year-old at the time, I had believed it to be obscene to have a cake that did not taste very good and proudly announced that the only cake I would accept at my wedding was one in the ooey-gooey chocolate variety.

Suddenly, the kind chuckle of my father rang in my mind, almost echoing on the inside of my skull. At a time, it always made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It made me feel at peace, because of all the good memories I had surrounded by that chuckle. His smiling face shone in my memory, his dark eyes which I inherited crinkled in amusement and during those times, everything was right in the world in my mind.

But now the memories were painful.

The memory of his smile morphed into the lifeless gaze he gave me after the explosion in Vienna. Blood dripped from his temple in a consistent stream. The memory of his stilled pulse creeps in; along with the feeling of his crushed skull against my hand as I held him. I miss his heartbeat and his friendly smile that was always full of life.

The memories set off a chain reaction, and another anxiety attack began.

"Can we make it chocolate cake?" I blurt out, glancing at the holographic clock on a nearby table. We had only been in this meeting for twenty minutes, but I was ready to get out. panic pooled to my stomach with a vengeance, and the walls felt like they were closing in around us. "And can we please hurry this along?"

I felt W'Kabi eye me skeptically since I had cleared many hours of my schedule this afternoon for this meeting. He reached for my hand and I squeezed it tightly two times; our language to tell each other when we were close to having an anxiety attack.

One tight squeeze of the hand meant we were okay.

Two meant we were edging close.

Three meant we had to get out now.

A discrete nod from my love followed the squeeze. "We trust you two to make our wedding memorable," he told the planners. "However, we do need to be going. I am afraid that we have another appointment in ten minutes that both of us forgot about."

"By memorable, do you mean we can set up for your rhinos to be witnesses?" Kali asked with a hopeful glint in her eye.

W'Kabi chuckled. "I do not know how the Queen Mother would feel about that. But we really must leave now."

Some other words might have been exchanged, but I can not recall what was being said. Soon I was being whisked out of the room and down a hall, out into one of the grand gardens behind the palace. The burst of warm, summer breeze struck me in the face and I sunk into the stone bench, my fingers curling around the front of it. "Thank you," I whispered.

Kneeling on one knee in front of me, he took my hands from the bench, holding them in his. "Hey, it's okay," he soothed. His calloused thumbs rubbed over the back of my hands, and he whispered other soothing things to me. "Do you want to discuss what happened? Is it about your father?"

I nodded and took a deep breath, attempting to calm myself before I fall into a full-blown panic attack. "I got lost in memories, I suppose. I...I do not know why I reacted like that."

"Because you are human," W'Kabi answered. I snorted despite myself.

"Always bringing me to a humbling level, aren't you, my love?"

"You are the King of an advanced country, along with the Black Panther. I fear that sometimes you forget that you are allowed; no, required to be human. At least on some days. You know that you have been diagnosed with PTSD after Vienna and that there is no shame in reacting like this."

I sigh and stared down at our hands joined together; two shades of brown layered on top of each other. "I know."

"Do we need to do the breathing exercises your mother practices with you?" he then suggested a hint of amusement in his tone since he knew how much I hated them. I shook my head.

"I am okay." I leaned down and kissed his head, the short, coarse curls against my lips. "Thank you."


End file.
